In his first 100 days, Trump still leans on an old foe: Joe Biden

WASHINGTON — America may be well on its way to forgetting Joe Biden; its president isn’t. 

Donald Trump spoke Biden’s name more than a dozen times on Jan. 20, day one of his second presidency, and from that point forward he has basically never stopped. 

As he nears the 100th day of his term, Trump has invoked his predecessor with a persistence that suggests the two are in the final throes of a bitter campaign. They aren’t and won’t ever be again: Biden pulled his name off the 2024 ballot and left elective office for good. But for Trump there is a certain political upside in making Biden a perpetual bogeyman. 

Mentioning Biden reminds voters that not so long ago, they were unhappy enough with high prices and illegal border crossings that they repudiated him and his hand-picked successor, Kamala Harris. Biden may also be a useful diversion from the whiplash of Trump’s term, shifting attention to the aged ex-president who struggled through speeches and looked unsteady on his feet.   

As children pushed their pink and yellow eggs at the White House’s annual Easter Egg Roll on Monday, Trump mingled with the crowd and mocked Biden over an incident that many may have forgotten, if they were ever aware of it at all. Three years ago, Biden hosted the Easter Egg Roll and was redirected at one point by an aide dressed in a bunny costume. 

“Do you remember the bunny with Joe Biden?” Trump said. “Do you remember when the bunny took Joe Biden out? He’s not taking Trump out.” At that, a costume bunny standing alongside shook its head in agreement.  

Amplifying the point, the White House’s official account on X posted video of the moment with the caption “The White House is no longer a nursing home.”  

In a statement for this article, White House spokesperson Liz Huston also invoked Biden and the work Trump has done moving on from his predecessor’s administration.

“President Trump has spent the first three months of his presidency cleaning up the disasters created by Joe Biden and Making America Great Again,” Huston said. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the border is secure, inflation is cooling, jobs are up, and common sense is restored.”

Trump’s running commentary on Biden brims with grievances large and small. To this day, he says he legitimately won the 2020 election. He has blamed Biden and other Democrats for the criminal investigations he faced in the aftermath.  

“The 2020 election was totally rigged,” he told reporters last month aboard Air Force One. He described Biden as a kind of presidential impostor who usurped Trump’s rightful place and then did “such a bad job.” 

In his Oval Office meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in February, the topic turned to the war between Russia and Ukraine. After he lay blame on Biden, Trump said it pained him to say as much.  

“I hate to say that about somebody that sat here just before me, but he did a terrible, terrible job,” Trump said.   

Unpleasant as it may be, Trump seldom tires of it.   

He has called Biden “pathetic,” “sad,” “a disaster,” “incompetent” and the worst president in history. Biden had “no clue.” He “didn’t know he was alive.”

Trump’s beef extends from matters of high foreign policy to White House decor. In February, he said he had approached the Biden administration with an offer to build a ballroom for the White House — something “beautiful” at a cost of about $100 million — but never heard back. 

“This question takes me back to 2017 and everyone asking why he mentions Hillary so much,” said Michael Dubke, a White House communications director in Trump’s first term. “‘She lost; you won. Let’s move on, Mr. President.’ The foil is key to his central premise that those that came before broke it and I will fix it. Even now that the campaign is over, the foil still has value.”  

There may be another dynamic at work. Always mindful of his popularity, Trump may see Biden as competition for a place in the history books. In the zero-sum game of presidential rankings, if Biden falls in history’s estimation, Trump could rise. 

“In MAGA land, Biden was a false president. And Trump is trying to keep banging that drum so he can drive that narrative into the history books,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. 

The numbers tell the story — of a president who, as much as he may want to make America great again, would be happy to see Americans abhor Biden for all time.   

So far, Trump has spoken about Biden, his family or his administration at least 580 times either in public remarks or on his social media site, an NBC News analysis shows. That’s an average of six times every day of his presidency.   

After he won the 2020 election, by contrast, Biden mentioned Trump 29 times in the first 100 days of his presidency. That’s an average of once every 3½ days. Even then, he did so with a certain reluctance.  

“I’m tired of talking about Donald Trump,” Biden said at a town hall-style event. 

Last month Trump used a televised event showcasing Elon Musk’s Tesla vehicles to take multiple digs at Biden. Holding notes showing prices of Tesla cars, Trump said: “They gave me notes. I said, ‘I’m not Biden, I don’t need notes.’” 

He then climbed into a red Model S sitting on the White House’s South Lawn.

“You think Biden could get into that car?” he told the assembled reporters.   

Trump has given no sign that his preoccupation with Biden is waning. He’s using the ample communication tools at a president’s disposal to keep his predecessor front and center, with aides and subordinates stepping forward to sustain the drumbeat.  

Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has mentioned Biden 78 times in the 16 briefings she has given thus far, including 37 times unprompted in her opening remarks.  

Cabinet members have gotten into the act, as well. When he was called upon during a televised Cabinet meeting on April 10, Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, opened with “Mr. President, the Biden EPA was strangulating the economy.”  

Later in the meeting, when it was his turn to speak, Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, told Trump: “You came into an emergency situation where President Biden left us with a $1.2 trillion trade deficit. It’s the largest of any country in human history.” (A number of economists argue that running a trade deficit isn’t necessarily harmful. The United States gets valuable goods in return.)

Trump jumped in.    

“You said the largest in history, right?” Trump said. “There’s never been anything like what he left us. He left us a mess. His whole administration was a mess.” 

Four other officials at the table in the Cabinet Room that day — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Kelly Loeffler, head of the Small Business Administration — also used their public remarks to take swipes at the Biden administration.   

At times, Trump-friendly conservative news outlets have teed up fresh opportunities for him to skewer Biden. At a joint news conference at the White House with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a reporter for The Gateway Pundit asked Modi whether he was more confident of a successful relationship with the United States under Trump “versus with Biden’s incompetence and weakness over the last four years.” 

Before Modi could answer, Trump laughed. 

“I agree with you,” he said. “Yeah, gross incompetence.”  

Since he took office, Trump aides have exercised tighter control over which news outlets are allowed onto Air Force One and into smaller spaces that can accommodate only a certain number of journalists.  

In February, the White House stripped The Associated Press of its traditional spot in the small group of journalists allowed to cover the president in such settings, citing its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” the name Trump has given it.  

No AP reporters were on board during an Air Force One flight April 13 when Trump stopped by the press cabin to take questions. A reporter from Real America’s Voice was on the plane, however, and at one point posed this question: “How do you do it, Mr. President? I haven’t stayed up to 2 a.m. in the morning since I was 25. And now we’re 2:16 in the morning having a press conference. How do you do it?” 

“Biden was sleeping for 10 hours already,” Trump said.  

Asked about Trump’s fixation with Biden, a White House aide to the former president said: “It’s bizarre.” 

“I think it’s his attempt to distract from what he’s doing to the economy. I also don’t think he is over the fact that Biden beat him in 2020,” the person added, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk freely.   

Denouncing Biden is easy enough; proving the point is tougher.   

Trump has faulted Biden for giving Ukraine aid in the form of a grant, as opposed to the Europeans, who he said will be getting their money back. Both Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron corrected him on that point in separate Oval Office meetings.  

He has accused Biden of weaponizing government and said he ended the practice. Trump’s detractors say he has used his power to retaliate against perceived political foes, including Chris Krebs, who was a Homeland Security official in the first term. Trump signed an executive memo this month yanking Krebs’ security clearance. Among the sins spelled out in the memo was Krebs’ denial that the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen.” 

An argument Trump makes is that Russian President Vladimir Putin so disrespected Biden that he felt free to wage war with Ukraine. Now that Biden is gone and Trump is back in the n White House, “President Putin wants to have peace,” Trump told reporters in February.  

Putin, he said, “didn’t want to have peace with Biden. And you tell me why that is, OK?” 

Though Trump promised during the campaign to end the war on his first day as president, administration officials have lately sounded resigned to its continuation. Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this month that the United States may be ready to “move on” from its attempts to broker a peace agreement.  

As the 100-day milestone approaches, Trump is nearing the point where it’s becoming harder to blame Biden for what goes wrong. 

Trump’s start-and-stop approach to worldwide tariffs has rattled the financial markets, jeopardizing the 401(k) plans that millions of people rely on for retirement. Consumer confidence has dropped.

People may now be less interested in what Biden did than in how Trump will dig out of a hole rooted in his seesawing trade policies. 

“It always gets more challenging to blame current conditions on your predecessor the farther you get from your predecessor’s time in office,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “That’s especially true with the economy, which has reacted rather strongly to Trump’s tariffs and trade war.”